Wall Re-visited

The wall that appears to have come adrift from the house that was exposed when we removed all of the plaster has been the subject of further discussion.

It is now very clear that the flank and back walls were never attached to each other when the property was originally built. So much for Victorian build quality! In some respects, as it has been like this for a 100 years, we could just fill it and suggested before but I feel uncomfortable about this.

I took the oportunity to telephone Chawton Hill, the surveying firm who we used in the first place, to talk it though with them. It makes life so much easier when you can just send a high quality picture over email so no site visit is necessary! I think the receptionist thought it was quite funny that I wanted to send the surveyor a picture of a wall. I don't suppose their acceptable use policy for the internet mentions picture of bricks.

There are two solutions. The first is to take away several columns of bricks and re-build the corner of the house. This would take time and be very expensive as a full scaffold rig would be required. The second method is to purchase some galvanised steel straps to hold the wall together from the inside and fill the hole with a sand and cement mix as a sort of glue. The straps would then be plastered over and everything will be fine.

Our builder is comfortable taking either approach and I see little point in taking the first option. It doesn't add anything to the house (unless we were planning on leaving exposed brick at the back of the house) and gives us added unnecessary expense.

Steel straps it is then.

On-Line Plumber

The plumber we are using to do much of the work in the house is a friend who is embarking on a plumbing course and needs some practice.

He has also decided to blog his experiences and that includes the work on this house. He has some more picture of our house including some that I haven't seen as he has been there more recently than me.

If you want to see some pictures or catch up with David's progress it can be found here. At least I have categorical evidence that the boiler has been decommissioned.

Something I won't be doing again

Today was supposed to be house clearance day and the company I booked to do it duly turned up at about 09:30 as agreed.

The way these companies work is that they turn up, give you a quote, which you then accept or reject. Luckily there is no obligation to accept the quote and you don't pay a call out fee to get them there in the first place.

Why is this lucky?

If you remember from a previous post I had anticipated that to clear the house would cost £143.00 plus a bit for some extra weight. In my mind I thought it might cost nearer £250.00 and possibly as much as £300.00. The quote when it came this morning was a surprise £1,300.00!!!

I declined their offer and a skip with permit is being delivered to site tomorrow morning while I enjoy a tasty meal of humble pie with a side order of words.

This has set us back a day as the front room in the house was full of rubbish waiting to be removed and of course it is still there. As I said in the title of this post - something I won't be doing again.

Building Report

Wow. The house looks very different already.

The building work started this morning or should I say the demolition work started this morning. There are two guys at it and when I popped round at lunchtime to give them a second set of keys much progress had already been made.

As you might expect there is mixed news. Upstairs the rear bedroom no longer has any ceiling or any plaster on any of the walls. Apparently the plaster wasn't "live" (a new phrase I have learned) which means it was no longer attached to the underlying wall. There is a large and rather worrying hole in one corner through which you can see outside! At some point somebody had just decided the best way to fix this problem was to plaster over it! It is difficult to know why the hole is there but obviously it is going to get filled. If it was movement in the walls then it is historic and no cause for alarm for us. There is a lot of repair work to do on all of these walls and I wasn't that impressed with the vertical crack down one wall but I am assured that this is nothing to worry about.

Here are some pictures of what it looks like now (click on any of them to enlarge, they are of reasonable quality and really show the detail). The paper like stuff stacked up on the floor is some very old fashioned loft insulation.









Once these walls have been repaired we can put plasterboard directly onto them and then skim that. This is more expensive in materials but much cheaper in labour and much much quicker in time.

Curiously the other upstairs bedroom is fine and we will be able to keep the ceiling and all of the existing plaster which is great news.

Downstairs we have discovered an old window (or door we need to hack off more plaster to discover which it is) which somebody has just taken out and filled with bricks leaving the soldier courses and wooden lintel in place. The quality of the repair is shocking even to my untrained eye and we will need to put a couple of stongboys in there to prop up the house to remove the bricks and lintel and then replace them. It is not a huge job but there will be an interesting hole in the wall while it is being done. Here is a picture of the wall showing the brickwork. Stunningly poor quality. Even with a DPC this house would have been damp.



The gas supply will be capped tomorrow morning and the water system drained so we will be able to rip out everything else. The house clearance people arrive between 9:00 and 11:00 on Wednesday so all of the clearance will need to be finished by then. It will be tight but the guys seems supremely confident that they will be ready. I'll try and get some more photos Wednesday evening.

Rubbish Clearance

A last, and with a fair wind, work proper should start on the house this Monday. I have been anxious to get on with it but in fairness we only completed 10 or so days ago and you cannot expect people to be hanging around waiting to start work, even in a recession.

So the first job is to clear the house of all of it's fittings. Kitchen, bathroom, cupboards, radiators, hot water tank, floor coverings (what there are), plaster on all of the downstairs walls, some ceilings, old grippers rods, electric sockets and light fittings, internal doors, one internal wall, some internal doors and so on. You name it and it will go. At the end of this the house really will be an empty shell of rooms and a staircase with all the poor quality plaster removed. The only thing staying that will eventually go is the windows.

The builder thinks it will take two or three days to clear the house, I think this may be a little ambitious but there again with nobody living there and nothing that you need to look after it may be possible. There will be a lot of rubbish to be cleared away so the next question to decide is how should this is best done.

The builder has already said "you better order a skip" which is the obvious answer but I have been looking at other services from companies that claim to take your rubbish (including rubble etc) away from you for a fee and this option is looking quite attractive.

A 6 yard skip which seems to be a pretty standard size is £194 including VAT to hire from one website I tried. I am sure it will be possible to shave a few pounds off this but it will do for the purposes of comparison. On top of that I would need to apply for a permit to put the skip on the road which round here is £50.00 (if I remember rightly from the last time we needed one). So, all in all, a skip will cost £244.00 which could end up being higher if 6 yards is not enough.

There are various companies offering a totally different service of basically coming to your house, assessing how much stuff you have, and then quoting you to take it away. One of them claims that 7.5 yards would cost £165.00 (incl VAT) but they will charge £70.00 per hour for labour after two hours. They also charge more for heavy loads like rubble etc but our load will be mixed so we should avoid this. There is another company who seem to charge £143.00 for 8 yards which is cheaper again but the website is less clear about extras.

The other advantage is that if you need more space than 7.5 yards it is not a problem, you just pay more. In addition, there is no danger of everybody else in the area dumping their old furniture into your skip! I can see why this service would not suit if you have nowhere to store you junk before collection but there is no reason why we cannot stack thinks up in the front room and let then take it from there.

This seems a no brainer to me. Cheaper, quicker and more flexible. I cannot think of any reason why I wouldn't want to use this type of service.

If anybody has experience of this I would love to hear about it.

October Statistics

It’s the first of November which gives me an excuse to look at my blog statistics for October.

There have been 259 visits to the blog this month from 40 visitors. There was one from New Zealand (Auckland) and one from USA (Florida) but I must confess to knowing who they both were. Still quite exciting though!

There are so many statistics you can get from Google Analytics I could put on my anorak and quote them for page after page..... but I won’t.

Boiler Update or Boiler Re-Visited

OK. After a bit more research it appears that I will need a combi boiler rated between 24Kw and 30Kw.

If you are all sitting comfortably at the back I will try and explain why size matters.

One of the key differences between the two is that the higher rated units have a higher water flow which is measured in litres per minute. This is the number of litres of water per minute that the boiler can heat to 35 degrees centigrade (I didn’t decide on this temperature, presumably some industry body did). Most boilers are rated between 9 and 12 litres per minute.

This does not make as much difference when you are trying to heat the house, a lower rated unit will just take longer, but clearly matters a lot if you are trying to run lots of things requiring hot water at the same time like a washing machine, a dishwasher, a shower and a bath. Many units such as washing machines can work solely on a cold feed these days so they don’t necessary have any impact on the boiler at all.

Buying a unit that is bigger than you need is a waste of money to buy and to run but getting one too small is a big mistake. To try and work out which size I need I e-mailed a boiler company, a specialist supplier and filled in one questionnaire on the internet and described the basic layout of the house. The only constant in their replies was the lack of consistency. Basically it appears that either will do the job.

There is no end to the number of companies out there offering boilers over the internet at what seem to me to be competitive prices. One of them even trades via eBay (at very competitve prices) as well as through some specialist outlets in Kent.

The problem with boilers is that for amateurs like me I have never heard of most manufacturers. I have never driven cars from most of the manufacturers in the world but I have probably heard of them and may even have an opinion about their quality. It is the same with consumer electronics. With boilers, apart from Glow-Worm and Potterton, I don’t think I have heard of any of them and most people don’t bother to write reviews about what a great boiler they have just bought. Understandable really; they will have better things to do with their lives.

Anyway to get to the point a new boiler will cost somewhere between £500 and £750 pounds. I will probably get a 30Kw unit to be sure. Now all I have to decide is which of these manufacturers that I have never heard of is the right one. Alpha, Ariston, Baxi, Buderus, Chaffoteaux, Ferroli, Glow-Worm, Ideal, Keston, Potterton, Vaillant, Viessmann, Vokera and Worcester with apologies for any I have missed.

UPDATE : Thank you to Tim who has clarified the point about temperature in his comment on the earlier post.